Afterword

Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman

The afterword reiterates it is time to risk a border-crossing in our view of art and see it as part of our shared affective becoming-excessive, as a fundamentally non-cognitive zone of self-othering that all animals engage, not just human animals. Art connects us profoundly to other creatures. The aesthetic capacity is animal; it doesn’t just approach animals or hold them in its purview. And if this is the case, then we can anticipate wholly new ways of viewing, inhabiting, and understanding artistic practices. The transporting power of art, the becoming-intense of aesthetics, the felt vibrations of aesthetic forces, and the taste for certain affect-circulating performances all have their “ancestral” lineage in animals’ aesthetic engagements. Bioaesthetics thus reminds us that the world of art includes hordes of other creatural actors and living assemblages—and that these beings have always been artistic.

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.


Author(s):  
Yuriko Saito

This chapter argues for the importance of cultivating aesthetic literacy and vigilance, as well as practicing aesthetic expressions of moral virtues. In light of the considerable power of the aesthetic to affect, sometimes determine, people’s choices, decisions, and actions in daily life, everyday aesthetics discourse has a social responsibility to guide its power toward enriching personal life, facilitating respectful and satisfying interpersonal relationships, creating a civil and humane society, and ensuring the sustainable future. As an aesthetics discourse, its distinct domain unencumbered by these life concerns needs to be protected. At the same time, denying or ignoring the connection with them decontextualizes and marginalizes aesthetics. Aesthetics is an indispensable instrument for assessing and improving the quality of life and the state of the world, and it behooves everyday aesthetics discourse to reclaim its rightful place and to actively engage with the world-making project.


Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.


2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang

Chinese garden art has developed gradually along with the neutralization--lasting appeal--artistic conception trend till to the peak, meanwhile, those aesthetic forms can be existed synchronously with historical advancement, logic arrangement in parallel and correspondence as well as abundance and deepening of the interior connotation and exterior extension, which represent the high uniformity of the development history and logics of Chinese garden art. Nowadays, the landscape garden development is required to probe its root, explore its cultural soul, so as to base itself upon the garden industry all over the world. Additionally, the function of traditional aesthetic form will show the powerful functions, declare publicly the deep influence of modernized landscape garden development.


Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS GRANT

This article examines the border-crossing journalism of the Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-355
Author(s):  
Oksana Yurisovna Dinislamova

The article deals with phraseological units of the Mansi and Russian languages as lexical means of description of a person’s appearance within the framework of the aesthetic category of “ugliness” in the context of the linguocultural content of national pictures of the world; reflection of people’s ideas about “ugliness” is revealed; the universal and specific parameters of figurativeness of metaphorical expressions in description of “ugliness” are determined; the components of semantics and internal figurative forms that create the national-cultural specificity of the considered phraseological units are described. The purpose of the article is to study phraseological units representing the appearance of a person and being lexical means of representation of aesthetic feelings and aesthetic taste of the Mansi and Russian peoples by describing the aesthetic category of the “ugliness” existing in the minds of native speakers.


Author(s):  
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kormin

This article reveals the philosophical grounds of the aesthetics of color, analyzes the correlation between the structures of philosophical and artistic comprehension of coloristics. Interaction of philosophy and art as the forms of cultural identity manifests in the sphere of intellectual understanding of the perception of color and its semantics in painting. In the hidden logic of contemplation of color, can be traced the outlines of the problematic of transcendental and intelligible in art conditions for the aesthetic approach towards chromatic space. Color creates the visual beauty, thus it is apparent why the aesthetic knowledge seeks to clarify to which extent we can assess the experience of color – the result of coloration of light. The art itself creates the so-called color ontology of the world. First the first time, the beauty of color and its perception are analyzed in the context of correlation between art and transcendental traditions of philosophizing  (Descartes, Kant, early Husserl –  his work “The Philosophy of Arithmetic”) that allows matching the key to a new interpretation of the tradition of color. Determination of its meaning requires comparing history and structure of the philosophical and artistic metaphor of color. It is demonstrated that the phenomenon of color is of crucial significance for the aesthetics, as it implies not only comprehension of the problem of correlation between nature and art, but also cognition of the beauty of color, its universal value for all forms of art, profound structures of perception of coloristic phenomena, picturesque unveiling of the color harmony of the painting.


2020 ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
N.V. Khalikova

The purpose of the article is to compare the definitions of a stylistic device with modern philological ideas about the text and the image of the author as the main subject of cognition of reality in a feature. The methods of structural poetics make it possible to separate the stylistic means and methods as functionally different units of the artistic speech and the language of the writer. There is a steady connection between the worldview of the writer, their “image of the author” and their style. Autological and metalogical stylistic means are equally important for creating both an artistic and a non-artistic image (journalistic, scientific, everyday). Artistic means and techniques perform fundamentally different functions. Artistic means of image expressiveness contribute to the aesthetization of speech. Stylistic techniques organize the processes of meaning generation, preservation and transmission of meanings. The text records and reproduces artistic thinking, typical for this very writer, a set of ideas about a human, landscape, interior, ways of action and other classes of images. The artistic style is the same as the style of thinking, a level speech style of reflecting the perception of reality. The style can be adopted, it can be imitated and, thus, one can understand how the author thinks, what their manner of the aesthetic transformation of reality, forms of perception, is. The stylistic forms of the same author are reproduced from work to work, regardless of the plot and ideological content. To explain how the technique works is to identify the ways of the artistic thinking about the world (images). The stylistic device is closely connected with the intellectual book culture of society.


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